The Second Snowfall

When you’re young, your year is broken up and organized by the socially imposed calendar of holidays and school schedules. Perhaps religious observances too, depending on background and affiliation. But the calendar, which always felt so fixed and certain, guiding as it did the seasons of celebration, vacation times, barbecues, and what have you, begins to dissolve at some point.

For some people, perhaps it was never very firm to begin with. The traditions of our parents are partly what secure it in place, with the annual buying of the Christmas tree and cooking of the turkey and deciding who will host Easter this year. Those without strong family ties or those for whom a holiday is all fuss without much reward might have never found it all to mean more than a few days off.

I used to love this time of year. My birthday falls in early November, a few days after Halloween, and it always felt the like the kick off of an entire season of warmth and connection and joy. I love the idea of advent - a hopeful waiting in anticipation of good news - though it wasn’t a very distinctive part of a non-liturgical calendar-based upbringing. Dad enjoyed Thanksgiving and even when that became a burden of travel and preparing large meals in strange places on short notice, it was still a time of reconnecting with our parents and considering together what we had to be grateful for. (It always felt trite to say the real day-to-day things, and yet those gently careworn and mended parts of our lives deserve to be brought to the forefront and examined with delight as though they were sparkling, well-cut gemstones and not the mundane clothes that we wrap around our existence.)

But parents pass, and lives change. My birthday doesn’t feel like such an event when I’ve planned too many others already and can’t comfortably ask friends to make more space in their busy schedules. My partner would really prefer if holidays didn’t exist at all, I think, and there’s no one else to share the tofurkey with (though he does try - he likes the tofurkey if nothing else). 

The traditions are adapted: this year, I’ll visit with friends in Philadelphia, but won’t go for our annual friends’ Christmas, trading the opportunity of a longer stay now for a whirlwind one later. After many years of no trees, I’m determined to light up our new home with one, assuming the cats don’t eat it.

But as the seemingly fixed points blur and slide and change, a different calendar’s bones are laid bare through the gaps. I understand why holidays were set when they are, as I relish a different advent, the coming of the shortest day, when the light begins its slow returning. And as I get older, I wince a little at summer solstice, something I never bothered to observe before. But now it signals a quiet doom for the days of summer as the days shorten in the slide down toward the cold, dark womb of winter. One feels more locked into the motions of the earth and the heat of the sun, which dictate different kinds of traditions. The body’s need for warmth and sunlight, but also a need for hibernation and rest. 

I have no clear ending for this. I am simply exploring what it means to live in this moment of my life.

My Geologist Friend and I

 When land is under a heavy weight, whether due to glaciation or the presence of a large mountain, and that weight diminishes - the glacier recedes, the mountain erodes - the surface begins to rise as it is released from beneath that mass. 

At some point, everything that could go wrong stopped going wrong.

At some point, the worst had already happened so many times over that there was no more worst left to happen. There were only ordinary catastrophes, the sort that, given context, are revealed to be inconveniences masked with borrowed significance. Stripped of their finery, they can be dealt with in an orderly fashion and forgotten entirely by week’s end.

When this happens, things do not merely settle as they are. After a year of being surprised by tragedy, one does not stop being surprised, but one’s eyes become opened instead to joy.

“Man found alive with two legs.” I and Innocent Smith delight to, borrowing Denise Levertov’s words, “take pleasure in what is seemly.” 

Waking up to a day with manageable cares. The purrs of a contented cat. A bus right on time that was thought to have already passed the stop. The scolding of a jay. The many-voiced song of a mockingbird. A quiet word of encouragement. The morning light through the pines, laid across a field of ghostly dandelion globes dancing like drunkards who hear silent music out of Faerie. A silly text from one who is beloved. Laughter shared amid well-earned exhaustion. Lines of poetry to restore one’s soul.

Levertov again: “for though I felt nothing, no embrace: I have not plummeted.”

Instead, as the ice age’s cruelty draws back its frozen fingers, I surge forth in isostatic rebound, not content to settle as I was before but rising “like the earth’s empowering brew […] in root and branch.” It is the nature of all spring times that what was dormant now draws toward the sun.

Books of 2023

(Mostly) alphabetical by author. The fact of my having read something should not be perceived as a recommendation that you or anyone else do so. 

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

Persuasion - Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust
Switchboard Soldiers - Jennifer Chiaverini
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Victory - Joseph Conrad
Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
The Keepers of the House - Shirley Ann Grau
An Armenian Sketchbook - Vasily Grossman
Arena - Karen Hancock
Mr. Splitfoot - Samantha Hart
The Forest Unseen - David George Haskell

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I - Diana Wynne Jones
Dark Lord of Derkholm - Diana Wynne Jones
Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones 

Tomorrowmind - Gabriella Kellerman and Martin Seligman

The Magician’s Nephew - C.S. Lewis

The Lion, The Witch, & the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

The Horse and His Boy - C.S. Lewis

Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis

The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis

The Final Battle - C.S. Lewis

The Monk - Matthew Lewis

You Are Here - Karin Lin-Greenberg

The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett

Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett

Eric - Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett

Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett

Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett

Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett

Mort - Terry Pratchett

Pyramids - Terry Pratchett

Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett 

Sourcery - Terry Pratchett

Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett

Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

Tender at the Bone - Ruth Reichl
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling

Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind - Shunryu Suzuki-roshi
With the Old Breed - E.B. Sledge
The Daughter of Time - Jacqueline Tey
War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator
Summer - Edith Wharton
Lament for a Son - Nicholas Wolterstorff
The Great Divorce - Ilyon Woo
Swiss Family Robinson - Johann David Wyss
The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Love Episode - Emile Zola

Tidal Pool

 Life after loss is a unique experience. No- perhaps not entirely unique. But each fresh grief has its own inscape, as Wolterstorff observed in “Lament for a Son.” My mother’s death felt like a raw and tender wound, easy to chafe and renew with words poorly chosen. Those who were merely acquainted with her might puzzle over what there was to grieve. She could be vicious and vile toward those she blindly accused, or on a less personal level, she could baffle strangers by showing up miles from home without pants on. She did not have many casual acquaintances at her funeral. Those who knew her a little could sympathize with our feelings at least, but only a few such folks felt her loss - or if they did, were more focused on excusing themselves from any lingering sense of guilt over what they ought to have done or been for her than on fully accepting her absence. And those who knew her well were divided among themselves, some retreating to peace that the seeming chaos of her life had somehow found meaning in heavenly peace, others describing her life as “tormented,” and a few of us (I would include myself here as the pronoun suggests) trying to hold her legacy gently, in all its complexity: even if there were no heaven to soothe and smooth the weariness of a tragic, strange, and sharp existence, she still had her moments of unusual joy, equally fierce, and places where she touched the world with her own inimitable mark. 

Dad was different, and not just because they went so close together, almost as if he’d lost her again while they were out running errands, and she’d found someone who’d lend their phone or perhaps a police officer spoke to her, and she called him to come get her. Only this time they didn’t come home. That was Dad to a tee though. On the edges of things, out of the way in his shed or under a car or out in the garden. You always knew he was there because he’d be rumbling audibly to himself in his own world, but he blended into the background until something happened, and then he’d be the one to hook up the tow dolly and drive wherever to pick up a stranded daughter or show up daily at the nursing home with a vanilla latte for Mom. I forgot until the week before he died about the many Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings we’d spent together, just he and I or maybe both Maria and I when we were younger, going to church together while Mom found her own places to go because the vibes weren’t right. About breakfasts at Country Table with syrupy sweet hot chocolate and Belgian waffles under towers of whipped cream. About sitting in the passenger’s seat up front in the motor home playing viciously competitive alphabet games where we’d wait for miles for a tractor trailer to pass us with its reliable Q from the “air ride equipped.” He wasn’t someone who could have a deep conversation about most topics, but he was consistent and steady. And unlike Mom, who went out with pain and refusal and was the sort who’d wrestle an angel til it lamed her hip, Dad gave us permission to let him go and tried to be unobtrusive in his leave-taking too, telling us we shouldn’t fuss too much about his remains, just do whatever required the least work, he wasn’t worried about where his body ended up and in what form. He had spent his last bit of energy taking Mom’s ashes back to Lancaster. Perhaps we all asked too much of him without realizing it. Then again, we counseled him to wait in case he wanted something to keep her close, and perhaps he wanted to put all his affairs in order, being a conscientious man. He saw everyone, said his own private farewells, and then went to the hospital and only came out of it to die.

The older I get, the fewer moments of stillness I have. It’s too easy to get distracted, even without a phone close at hand. There are too many things, and they indeed, as the philosopher Smashmouth once said, start coming and they don’t stop coming. Sewing gives me a little quiet amid the noise, but it’s not a reflective silence, simply a cessation of higher order thought. Here though, it’s hard to avoid, or the avoidance of it will just sap your strength til you have to stop and look and wait until the looking becomes seeing, even if through a blur of tears. 

I think of all the things I will forget, given time. The feel of Dad’s callouses. The sound of Mom’s voice, which is what I remember now more than her words. This is a last opportunity to re-experience those things while they’re fresh, and perhaps, giving them the weight of my attention, to impress them a little more deeply and hold them just a little while longer. It may be painful - it so often is when we fix in memory places and times that we cannot ever return to - but at least it will be one place where we can meet again, long after they’ve gone.

Life and Letting Go

 When my dad was admitted to in-home hospice, he initially thought he was being discharged. This led to some confusion, as he sought to re-establish himself and get stronger, but Katrina sat down and told him that he’d been brought home not to recover but, eventually, to die. Dad has been prophesying his own demise for years, as he felt his exhausted body betraying him, so perhaps it was not a surprise that he should be accepting and philosophical in his response, telling her that “we can only be so possessive and let God do what he wants to do.”

Perhaps we should all hold the threads of our lives with such a slack grasp. It would lessen the griefs that I was mulling over today while driving away from my grandparents’ nursing home. The fields are mostly laid bare for the winter, and Lancaster’s summer green hills and blazing blue sky had been traded for a murky grey over barren browns. I passed a patch of milkweed and was struck by the thought of all the things that my parents and probably my grandparents will never see again. And most of them so unremarkable that you could hardly think back and say, ah that was the last cardinal.

I love how attention anchors me in present experience and helps me to recall and relive those moments again at a later time. It also makes it more painful: to remember the precise weight of Bear’s body in my arms and the smell of the fur at the nape of her neck also sharpened the edge of grief.

We are most present to those with whom we are most intimate. Wherever our minds may be, we are brought home to our bodies by touch, which demands that we come out of ourselves and take heed. Grandma is confined to a wheelchair after a month in the hospital, and her only complaint was that she could not move close enough to Grandpa, who has fairly limited mobility, to give him a kiss. Maybe it was easier for Dad to be philosophical about his own passing because he had already lost the one who could hold him in time.

Anniversary

She sits two feet away

And regrets that she cannot kiss him.

One day - perhaps you’ll recognize it,

Or just as likely not -

There will be a final darkened milkweed pod,

Burst and letting its seeds take the wind.

Death is an indoor matter

(Almost always)

Happening in beds that are not close enough to windows

Nor to the ones we love most.

The last slips in the door before it’s bidden.

Dirge Without Music

 By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled

Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

In Time

The first day of autumn here was sometime in early September. It had been a mild week, but the breezes still carried summer’s lazy humidity tinged with heat, right up until one Thursday morning when the 65 of the beautiful evening before had been transformed into a chillier 65 that threatened to bite. Ordinarily that might be cause for celebration: October is usually jam packed with fun events, the warming spices and knitting come out again, Christmastime is on the horizon, and I begin my annual determined few weeks of seeing all of my good friends one-on-one for coffee or drinks, which is how I’ve taken to celebrating my own birthday as a boring ass adult. But as the sun rose on that morning, it felt like one more death than I had left in me to handle. 

Jo March is the Gryffindor of Little Women: everyone thinks that’s who they’d be, at least initially. But I always identified more with Beth. Not the melodramatic dying bit - thankfully I’m in excellent health - but the grief on Claire Danes’s face when she asks, “Why does everyone want to go away?” On grayer days, that’s the frame for my world: there was a moment that I didn’t know was perfect until slowly its components slipped away one by one. First, my sisters moving to Seattle one after the other, and somewhere in there, my parents selling the childhood home and moving several states away too. Then losing a beloved roommate to work in yet another state. My boyfriend moving around the region, following post-doctoral work 2-5 hours away. The severings of COVID, which were more ambiguous but felt the more intensely for introducing physical isolation. Bear limping to me as I opened my front door coming back from a long weekend, and six weeks later she was dead. Moving, at long last, because everyone else close to me had except Gwen, and more partings. Mom fighting cancer but not understanding the terms of the engagement and losing. Without her Dad not knowing how to want his own future, and he too has come close to slipping out of our hands.

I feel a little bit like I’m dying too. Again, not in that Beth way, but in one of the transformations we undergo at moments in our lives when the many adaptations we’ve made to survive begin to produce deeper changes. How do I perceive myself? What are my goals? What doors are being locked and unlocked at this moment? Being fully in one place for the first time in so long - no weekend trips to see Pierce, no weekly commutes to New York City for work, old ties weakening, new ties being formed - I don’t feel as good as I expected. It was exhausting to maintain at times, but cloistered here entirely I feel stifled and forgotten. Like stars being birthed in a cloudy nebula there are pinpricks of light: a spontaneous adventure, a new friend, a novel that soothes and then scalds, the pungent kicks of garlic and cumin and miso and chili oil.

It will be months til the darkness is turned back at the solstice. Little wonder that we’ve arranged several holidays to fall in that period when we most need the comfort and consolation of other people’s company. And perhaps I shall draw the shadows around me like a blanket, and use the months of gathering gloom to conceive, like my father, of what a future without the past self I inhabited so fully might look like.

Hospice

I am not doing any of these things perfectly. I may not even be doing them well. But dwelling on my shortcomings feels too selfish of a preoccupation in this moment, and an intolerable preoccupation at that. There is no more time to prepare: what could even be done to remedy it? 

And so things are as they are, and the resources I have are what I have to work with. When everything I encounter takes the form of an unrelenting, unbearable headwind, how do I stand in it and not be knocked over?

The word "gracious" comes to mind. The wind rises, the slender reeds shiver and flex and rise again with its falling. To not be perfect amid difficulty but to choose grace, from moment to moment. 

And this is not a moment to react with defensiveness or anger or frustration or disappointment, though they're close to the surface as the pressure is applied. There is no time for these things, because in one universe, time is ending. A life that one person still desires with a fierce desire, that she is not resigned to giving up: but she does not desire pain. Moment to moment, seek grace.

Anchor

By the window, where the light pours in, we have joy. The myriad comforts of everyday life or even the extraordinary pleasures that come to us rarely and are delightful for their unusual unfamiliarity. I cherish the sensation of washed linen against my skin. I laugh at a cheeky text from my boyfriend. I celebrate the prospect of new friendships or the success of a new venture. I enjoy the satisfaction of re-experiencing what I have been able to accomplish with my hands and simple materials as I wrap myself in a beautiful shawl. I savor new tastes and textures at a pleasant dinner with friends. Both the present and the future feel bright.

On the opposite side of the room where the shadows find space to gather, we have sorrow. Rooted in what has happened, what is happening, what we know or fear will soon come. As parents grow older and their medical diagnoses multiply and become scarier, as other loved ones confront unexpected health challenges, as I grieve the loss of a beloved pet, as personal ambitions meet frustration at every turn and fears of financial insecurity loom like a dark cloud on the horizon, as isolation creeps up slowly and darkens the already dark nights. Were we to number them, they might overwhelm us. To repeat their litany, fingering each bead as it passes along the string and being confronted by its hard reality, would be a slow descent into anxiety and melancholy.

At every moment, these are with us. Some retreat into the background, while others take their place. Time lessens the sting of old wounds, time inflicts new ones. How do we choose for ourselves the path that we will walk in mind and in heart? To focus on only joy would be naive and even selfish in its ignorance. To focus only on grief would be a kind of claustrophobic shutting out of the light and reducing space to its smallest dimensions, a different kind of naivete - nihilism - that shuts its eyes to all that's good and beautiful. If I see my joy through my pain, if I see my pain through my joy, what will I find in this strange and wonderful life? I hope the strength to endure and the tenderness to love despite it all, and the wisdom to meet each day as it comes with patience rather than fear.

In Memory of February 5, 2016

You couldn’t stay:

It’s not in the nature of airy things.

You felt too light on my hip

Like downy dandelion seeds

That blow away in a puff of breath.

Like dry leaves scattering

On a breeze from nowhere.

I cannot see who blows the breath.

I cannot see whence comes the wind.

I can only feel

The soft weight of your lightening body

As it comes to a rest on my foot.

Books of 2020 and 2021

Oof. It has been a while, hasn't it? As with many things in the past few years, both this blog and my pleasure reading have fallen by the wayside. But as I poke my head out from the rock I've been living under since August of 2019 (Smeagol is FREEEE!), I'm trying to catch up on a few of those things I've been missing. As the following list, compiled from the past two years, indicates, I have not been reading much. But I've already finished 3 books in 2022, and we're only 5 days in, so I think that bodes well. I am looking forward to visiting with old friends, making new ones, and hopefully diversifying my topics of conversation a little bit, for everyone who has been bored with hearing me refer to the same few things every time we talk (but also, that's unlikely to change: the impression made by certain books can be measured in decades, not months or years).

So without further rambling...

2020

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod
Endurance - Alfred Lansing
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
City of Brass - S.A. Chakraborty
Underland - Robert MacFarlane
Weather - Jenny Offill
Gathering Mosses - Robin Wall Kimmerer
In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado
How to Be Anti-Racist - Ibram X. Kendi
So You Want to Talk About Race - Ijeoma Oluo
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century - Maria Sachiko Cecire
The Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien
Prairie Fires - Caroline Fraser
The Oracle Code - Marieke Nijkamp
Walter Benjamin’s Archive - eds. Marx, Schwarz, Schwarz, & Wizisla
Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
On Trails - Robert Moor

2021

The Voyage of St. Brendan
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Caste - Isabel Wilkerson
Howard’s End - E.M. Forster
The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett
The Home Place - J. Drew Lanham
Preserving Archives & Manuscripts - Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler
Death and the King’s Horseman - Wole Soyinka
The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham
Push - Sapphire
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists - Nikki Kendall
The Golden Thread - Kassia St. Clair
The Fabric of Civilization - Virginia Postrel
Christy - Catherine Marshall

Nevertheless, we persist

 The joke has been worn so many times it's see-through. It has been 500 years since March, or some variation thereof. Every month, sometimes every week, bringing a new challenge to respond to. Sometimes that challenge is just completing all the little tasks that need to get done, even in these strange times. Sometimes it's bigger with more uncertainty.

I don't know how we get through. I could not have coped with knowing that this would go on for so long when it all started in March. When I think about it, I'm reassured to see how well I've been able to weather it and I'm heartened by the goodness that has been revealed in the ways that people have reached out to help one another, even as, of course, the querulousness and bickering grow louder.

And I am So. Tired.

I'm reminded of something Nicholas Wolterstorff said in Lament for a Son: "Death is the great leveller, so our writers have always told us. Of course they are right. But they have neglected to mention the uniqueness of each death--and the solitude of suffering which accompanies that uniqueness. We say, 'I know how you are feeling.' But we don't."

There's both a unity and an isolation in how each of us is dealing with this situation. Each of us faces a similar global story: a novel virus sweeping the globe in ways that we have predicted but not so far seen in quite this way in recent history. Out of concern for ourselves and our loved ones, we've shut down so much of our social lives, restricted our movements, retreated into our homes and separate spaces. As individuals and governments struggle to chart a response, though, the original contours of the story begin to diverge for each person.

Someone else has lost a loved one, or even several depending on the circumstances. Someone else has lost their job. Yet another person was deemed an essential worker and had to work under very high stress conditions, sometimes for measly pay and little recognition in spite of the public plaudits offered more visible workers. We demanded that transit workers, trash collectors, delivery drivers, and hospital janitorial staff sacrifice their lives for us. Some people can't make rent and face eviction as housing courts reopen and emergency stays lift. And in the midst of all of this, the bruises of trauma and ignorance in national conversations about race.

Every single person has a different set of circumstances. The uniqueness of our lives, and the uniqueness of "the solitude of suffering," can be difficult to navigate. I have it so good, in terms of being cushioned from financial, health, and housing impacts, but I'm also isolated and depressed as the days grind on with no sign of improvement. I struggle to concentrate, to plan for the future, to go outside and take a walk.

I wonder in all this story of loss whether there's anything we've gained. I'm trying to think about these things, because I want there to be some kind of balance here. It is so hard. And also, in hard times, there are opportunities for good things to arise. If you think of any, let me know.

Discontent

It’s an aesthetically pleasing photograph that definitely fits into a particular design ethos and palette. The walls are white, the wide window sill is lined with small plants, and a gorgeous mustard-colored quilt with a white geometric design is stretched out over one workspace while the other, a table set on wooden sawhorses with large wicker baskets underneath, has been neatly laid out with measuring tools and cutting supplies. The quilter who took the photograph of her studio was delighting in the way the sunlight hit a disco ball-like, mirrored planter that cast a constellation of light across the ceiling.

The rest of her Instagram falls into the same vein of photography. Earth tones, minimalism, geometric shapes, and photographs of women dancing through creeks or a perfectly laid out photograph of a tent set against a rugged vista, the tent flap wide open to reveal a beautiful quilt spread across the air mattress. Who wouldn’t want to camp in that place and that moment?

Her life is beautiful, and she works in serene, sunlit places making beautiful things. Your life could be like this...

There are many beautiful things about sewing Instagram, not least that it’s a community that draws in people of every size, age, and skin tone. You don’t have to be young, pretty, and white to draw followers - although I can’t deny that that helps. But if you have a flair for the distinctive and some skill with a needle, a phone camera, and a few good hashtags, other sewing folk and would-be sewing folk will eventually stumble on your work and probably be inspired by it too. I’ve been inspired by it: in between coursework, I’ve been finishing a small sewing project and I’m planning to finish another. I’m dreaming about touching bolts of linen and anxiously comparing fabric colors and scrutinizing florals.

But there are so people in this community who are selling things. Classes, fabric, patterns, the items they make. And to sell those things, they’ve rigorously, carefully built a custom-tailored Instagram presence that’s also selling a dream. Like the dream of the quilter’s studio and her camping trip: “I don’t just sew - I live a beautiful life! Look at my rustic minimalist space. It’s so peaceful!”

I look up from my phone to see a mess of computer cables, my homely tower of craft bins labeled with my dope but industrial labelmaker instead of the fairly steady, romantic Copperplate hand that I’m capable of producing, my kitchen island that I’ve been dreaming of clearing off since I moved in, the mishmash of furniture that’s functional and comfortable and adaptable and even sometimes downright nice to look at but rarely cohering into a peaceful design scheme. 

It’s not peaceful, in spite of my best attempts to present a de-cluttered space. It’s sort of sunlit, sort of white, but I don’t mess with plants, and I’ve gifted my cat a giant piece of crunchy packing material that’s strewn across half the kitchen floor. My studio apartment will never be a wonder of artistic arrangement.

Or rather, it’s an artistic arrangement of a totally different sort: the current detritus on the aforementioned kitchen island includes a cutting mat, a half-sewn laptop sleeve, my metadata textbook, a bin of dried fruit and nuts that doesn’t fit in any of my cabinets, and my Mr. Beer 2-gallon keg of fermenting saison. I sew, I cook, I brew beer, I bind books, and this space is not pristine because I’m often in the middle of any number of projects that won’t tidily be packed away out of sight in the space that I have to work with.

And it reminds me, as I’m looking at all of it, that it takes a lot of work to present a space or a face in a particular way, which Instagram influencers will usually not show you. They’ll tell you, as a caption to a photo of an un-made-up face (foundation doesn’t count!) that was probably chosen out of 700 photos taken in different lights and from different angles and is somehow never unflattering, that their process is messy, that they get frustrated, that they had to rip out all their seams and start over or dump three batches of sourdough before a loaf actually turned out, but somehow, even the mess is curated and controlled.

As someone who couldn’t maintain a single aesthetic on my Instagram page if I tried, I respect that. They have to apply a lot of skills and effort to maintaining their followings and selling their brand. It’s a full-time job. 

Is it a good work? (Like: a truly good thing to do) I don’t know. It seems like it’s predicated on generating and monetizing envy and dissatisfaction. But they’re also often fairly skilled and genuinely inspiring, and they show what I could do, if I put in the time and effort to learn certain skills. That inspiration may be empowering for me. When it comes to sewing, it’s undeniable that well-fitted clothing makes me feel great about myself and my body, and seeing so many people making beautiful, well-fitting clothing suggests to me that it’s something I could do too.

For me, it’s mostly just helpful to be clear-sighted about what these people are doing. I understand why heavy Instagram use correlates more highly with depression than use of any other social media platform. When you scroll uncritically, you’ll be fed a steady diet of images that depict how great life could be - if only.  There’s plenty of ink spilled in critical theory about the illusion of the photograph as objective, real, evidentiary. At the end of the day, even an exact replica of a moment is framed, both physically and temporally, and the viewer cannot see what’s outside the frame. 

I think that being aware of the motivations and efforts of the people behind the photographs, and adding that filter to everything you view, can ultimately be critical to healthily enjoying, engaging, and being inspired by these communities. That picture of that studio was beautiful. But it’s also staged, and it’s okay if my process or my space doesn’t look like that: my job is not to convince people on Instagram to buy my life, and as far as I’m concerned, the reason I live the way that I do, with some caveats, is because this is how I like it to be. I’m grateful for what these people show me, and I’m grateful for what they create. I’m also grateful for the life that I have, and I hope that amid that gratitude, I can be content and let the beautiful things simply be beautiful without needing them to be mine.

Motion

If you’ve ever been at the viewing platform at John Heinz Wildlife Refuge early in the morning, you’ve probably observed the tree swallows engaged in a flurry of acrobatic activity, zooming above the water as they catch insects in mid-air and then rush home to feed their young. They never seem to sit still long enough to actually see them, unless they’re at the nest itself, in a frazzled rush to fill the many urgent little beaks that demand food.

Their energy is admirable and they’re wonderful to watch in motion, but I was struck when I finally saw one alight on a reed at just how rarely I see them pause. For a tree swallow, that probably works - their goals are simple but urgent, all about collecting the energy needed to be a top-notch aerial insectivore.

My thoughts sometimes feel like they’re locked in a whoosh of activity, flitting here, flitting there, probably less gracefully than the tree swallows in the arcs they trace as they fly high and low. I don’t know how to slow them down, and the things I ruminate on aren’t always healthy or good when they’re points of fixation. Seeing the swallow take a moment to rest was an invitation to stillness - though it was a little easier to stop the thoughts when I had an unobstructed view of a beautiful bird to concentrate on.

Recent events have slowed all of us down, but the circumstances provoke anxiety. It’s hard to focus, as I hover over one task, then another, but never come in to land. There’s a need to plan and to fix, but too much uncertainty to make any plans or fix most problems. If you’re feeling like I am, take a moment to accept that this is how things are for reasons beyond your ability to control. Let the world be as it is. And in that freedom of giving up, let your mind slow, still, and rest. Whatever happens will be, but for now, this is the time that is given to you.

Wait

What does it take to be intentional right now? Surely we’re already being asked to do so much: hold down a job while working from home in the midst of so many distractions, figure out what to do when there is no job to hold down because working from home is impossible, try not to panic or become depressed as all the benign routines of daily life become fraught with dangers to ourselves or to others and the endless scroll of a social media homepage becomes one pandemic article after another, figure out how to obtain perishable food items without going to the store (but what about the delivery drivers and low-paid grocery store workers?). Must we also add, on top of that, a demand to be intentional?

In my archival theory readings, there’s this buzz phrase, “reading against the grain,” and I feel like what we need right now is to be very deliberate about living against the grain. The urgency and intensity of the waves of bad news are such that it can be easy to follow them wherever they lead. I’ve tried to push back by emphasizing the good amid the bad, and that’s one way to do it. But I think there’s a deeper, non-reactionary action that needs to be taken, of pausing to breathe deeply, to focus intently and deeply on one thing whether that’s a book or a meditation or a complicated bit of needlework or two birds engaged in a mating display, thereby strengthening and providing respite for your spirit, so that you can take stock of your life as it currently is, take stock of the options open to your, and respond to the moment with clarity and vision (as far out as an hour or a day or a week, if nothing longer is possible).

For some people, this is a moment of furious activity, and certainly we should do what we can to support them. But for those of us who are not so engaged, whose role is to sit and wait, this is a tremendous opportunity. What have you been ignoring in your life, because you’re (deliberately?) too busy to take care of it? What is something you have not taken the time to celebrate, for which you’re grateful and can savor delight? Have you learned anything in this experience that might shape how you live your life as, some day, restrictions are lifted and everyday life resumes a less horrifying character?

I don’t have that much time between working from home and doing schoolwork, but I’ve been trying to take my own advice to heart. My emotions in the midst of this have been informative as I attempt to communicate my aspirations to scholarship committees and see doors close and lean into difficult situations. And, unusually for me at a time when I journal less than ever before, I’ve taken the time to write those things down.

There’s only so much time one can spend in introspection, and that’s good: the world is a good place and others are worth consideration, so we can and should be involved in the external world. But we can also find ways to make this an emotionally formative and informative experience.

May your spirits be strengthened and your hearts refreshed.

Silent, with a Breeze

Two women sit across a table, six feet apart, on a back patio, drinking beers from cans that have been sanitized. One brought the other a loaf of bread.

Strangers on Facebook offer help. Friends on Facebook offer services: tutoring in music theory, in Spanish, in chemistry.

Some people at the grocery store scoff, but nervously: there’s no toilet paper, no meat in the cases, I’m not afraid like the snowflakes - but ah, the waters run clear in the Venetian canals! There are dolphins!

Florists brought the flowers from all their canceled events and gave them away in a square.

Tickets that once cost $45 and up are now free and front row: opera for everyone! (who has internet, that is)

Naturalists trapped close to home post photos of turtle doves and garter snakes, not begrudging these common friends but delighting in them. Nature is never far for those with eyes to see the mosses and the “weeds.”

Reading groups cancel, then switch to online hangouts. We’ve been ready for this for so long, and we didn’t even know it.

A birthday approaches, and as housemates discover all the delivery options, we plan for chocolate cake, for pots of mussels in white wine broth, for sanitizing every container as it comes in. It hasn’t been five days, and I’ve already used 2 pounds of butter.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a walk, because this room is quite dark, and I’ve been looking for the light.

Mycorrhizae

With each new book about nature that I read, I find the story of competition for limited resources less and less compelling. The understories and overstories of trees are generous spaces, in which sick trees are nourished or dying trees send forth warnings of infestation that others may prepare against the onslaught. Stromatolites exist as a community of bacteria and other microorganisms, each contributing in its own way and reliant in its own way on the activities of others. We live in networks with one another, and we live and die by the strength of our community. If I lose, it is your loss too. If you lose, I grieve with you. Individualistic Western society embraced the model of survival of the fittest, but communalism recognizes that though this story has been explanatorily useful, it is not the final word.

A Long Overdue Meditation

"An so we've wrestled the cup out of Jesus's hand, and we've replaced it with a chalice, because who doesn't know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup? Never mind that Jesus didn't use a chalice, because if it's gold-plated and jewel-encrusted, it is more sacred." - Gregory Boyle

I don't know if I accept this without qualification. I can see a scenario in which love motivates the giving of the chalice into the hand of Jesus, not because it is more sacred, but because the crafting and purchase of it would have entailed sacrifices on the part of the followers. Is it so bad to wish to give something beautiful? I will not give offerings that cost me nothing.

But I think there is a lovely, quiet nugget of truth in the statement, which is that the humble everyday can be sacred. It does not take great gifts or great lengths to find the sacred into our lives. We can cherish what is small too: the blessings that don't cast a large shadow except in our hearts, the moments of generosity in friendship, the beauty of the natural and the mundane (taking a moment to give thanks for so much that we have the privilege to experience). The humble becomes sacred in how it is used, with gratitude, generosity, compassion, and love. And, since Boyle mentioned it, the same is true of the chalice.

Books of 2019

As is traditional, here is the list of books I have read in 2019. I was on quite a roll up until August, when to the surprise of no one, including but also except myself (what the conscious mind grasps can still startle the subconscious mind), it turned out that it was very hard to read much over and above my homework assignments. Still, I was please in reviewing the past few months to find that I had actually managed a fair bit, either through going to the Shakespeare Free Read-Aloud Group (yes, that counts) or through reading shorter works associated with the topics of my courses.

I don't have enough time or energy to go through and highlight or comment on the list as I've done in recent years, so formatting will have to suffice: Entries with an asterisk are those that most profoundly impressed or influenced my thinking or left me feeling intangibly richer for having read them. Entries in bold are ones that I read at the solicited recommendation of a friend. And a word to Dan, Kim, or Eli if you are reading this: your books are carrying over with me into the new year.

*The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World - Andrea Wulf
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Postliberation Eritrea - ed. Tekle Mariam Woldemikael
*Chesapeake Requiem - Earl Swift
*The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O’Conner
American Fascists - Chris Hedges
A Feast of Snakes - Harry Crewes
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
They Thought They Were Free - Milton Mayer
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories - Mark Twain
The Enchanted April - Elizabeth von Arnim
Finding God in the Waves - Mike McHargue
Labyrinths and Other Stories - Jorge Luis Borges
The Last Hours - Minette Walters
Oblivion - David Foster Wallace
*The Overstory - Richard Powers
The Concept of Law - H.L.A. Hart
The Country Girls - Edna O’Brien
Black Leopard Red Wolf - Marlon James
Known and Strange Things - Teju Cole
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
*Hadji Murad - Leo Tolstoy
Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Machado
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Munnu - Malik Sajad
Sula - Toni Morrison
The Mark of the Grizzly - Scott McMillion
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - Gabrielle Zevin
The Control of Nature - John McPhee
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
*War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia - Elizabeth Catte
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne - Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Circe - Madeline Miller
Sea Grapes - Derek Walcott
The Life and Death of King John - Shakespeare
Death and the Maiden - Ariel Dorfman
*Dopesick - Beth Macy
Five Moral Pieces - Umberto Eco
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Reader, Come Home - Maryanne Wolf
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Days - Salman Rushdie
Who Fears Death? - Nnedi Okorafor
Titus Andronicus - Shakespeare
States of Inquiry - Oz Frankel
*The Songs of Trees - David George Haskell
The Archivist Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order - Kate Eichhorn
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell
The Stone Building and Other Places - Asli Erdogan
*The Dark Fantastic - Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

What will I be reading in 2020? Currently, I'm halfway through The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, with The Science of Cheese and Underland on deck. My guiding selection principle for crafting a list of books to read is "books that are under 180 pages or over 500." It was only "under 180" until I realized that I need to read Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman this year, and the only way to get it on the list was re-drawing some inspired boundaries (or I guess I could have claimed that it was actually 5 180-page books in one volume, but I'm uneasy with universally applicable rules). Who knows? Maybe this will be the year that I finally read Gone with the Wind! I am still accepting suggestions for books under 180 pages, though if you've already mentioned one, it's already on my list.